High-speed rail

Yesterday, for the second time in as many weeks, the House T&I committee held a hearing on the benefit-versus-boondoggle high-speed rail debate. Last time, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was asked to defend the peppering of high-speed rail grants to projects outside the Northeast Corridor. Yesterday, the topic narrowed to focus just on California's high-speed rail project, whose recently-drafted business plan [PDF] has revised its total construction cost to $98.5 billion through 2033—up from $43 billion though 2020 just a few short years ago.

It's Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's birthday, and he's spending it testifying before the House Transportation Committee. The hearing is on "Mistakes & Lessons Learned" from the high-speed rail program, but -- no surprise here -- LaHood and House Republicans have differing ideas about what "mistakes" have been made.

How can you convince Americans that transportation is important enough to invest in?

House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica backed off his controversial plan to privatize passenger rail on the Northeast Corridor today, announcing at a press conference that reforming Amtrak would suffice.

Earlier this week, the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its new business plan [PDF]. The transportation establishment, the government, and the media issued a collective gasp: $98.5 billion? Thirteen years’ delay?

The full Senate passed a major appropriations bill yesterday, including funding levels for transportation and housing. The Senate put the kibosh on Sen. Rand Paul's attempt to strip bike/ped funding from the federal transportation program, as we reported yesterday. Here's the lowdown on the bill as a whole.

Streetsblog had a chance today to ask the former Democratic chief of the House Transportation Committee, Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, about life since the 2010 election, when he lost by a hair to Republican Chip Cravaack. He said he's spending his post-Congress time traveling to France, getting paid to say things he used to say for free, and telling his four kids and seven grandkids the story of his wife, who succombed to breast cancer 20 years ago.

House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) said this morning that getting permission from Republican leadership to find more revenues to fund the transportation bill was a “major breakthrough” but still won’t say where the money will come from.

High-speed rail has had a rough go of it lately. The House refused to give it a dime for next year, while the Senate only managed to allocate a fraction of what the president wanted. President Obama stuck some money back in via his jobs package, but it already seems clear that the package won’t pass as proposed, and we know high-speed rail is the always first for the chopping block.